The PR crowd at security software experts Sophos seem to have been a busy bunch of late, and after blasting Facebook for what they deemed to be overly complex and generally flawed changes to the social network’s ‘Groups’ section, today they have brought out a report that names and shames the worst countries on the planet for relaying spam.

They might like spam, most of us just want rid of it though.

The US is number one on this score according to Sophos, with India second – Ireland meanwhile, comes in at number 50 on the list. Said the report: “Since the second quarter this year, the spam output from the United States has increased significantly from 15.2% to 18.6% of global spam, making the country responsible for nearly one in five junk emails, and meaning that the USA contributes nearly 2.5 times more spam than the next worse offender, India.”

Some of the top spam relaying countries for July to September 2010 are as follows:

1.      United States – 18.6%

2.      India – 7.6%

3.      Brazil – 5.7%

4.      France – 5.4%

5.      UK – 5.0%

6.      Germany – 3.4%

=7.     Russia – 3.0%

=7.     S.Korea – 3.0%

9.      Vietnam – 2.9%

10.     Italy – 2.8%

11.     Romania – 2.3%

12.     Spain – 1.8%

14      Taiwan – 1.73%

15      Canada – 1.71%

16      China – 1.65%

19      Netherlands – 1.47%

25      Australia – 0.92%

29      Singapore – 0.73%

37      Japan – 0.58%

40      Austria – 0.52%

47      Switzerland – 0.35%

50      Ireland – 0.30%

54      South Africa – 0.24%

56      Hong Kong – 0.22%

59      Belgium – 0.19%

67      New Zealand – 0.13%

85      Luxembourg – 0.05%

Those figures show that our neighbours in the UK have dropped down one position since the previous quarter (from fourth to fifth place) and Britain is now responsible for relaying 5% of all spam this quarter. Meanwhile, the top spam-relaying continents, for the period of July – September 2010 is as follows:

Europe:        33.1%

Asia:            30.0%

N America:  22.3%

S America:   11.5%

Africa:          2.3%

Other:           0.8%

Adds Sophos, “Almost all of this spam comes from malware-infected computers (known as bots or zombies) that are being controlled by ‘botherder’ cyber-criminals.” Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant with the company adds, “Spam isn’t just a nuisance, it’s used by cyber-criminals as a means of growing their operations. You should never even be tempted to open a spam message out of curiosity, as it can only take a second to effectively hand over control of your computer to the spammers.  If your computer does become part of a botnet, you’re also inviting further malware infections, which may compromise your personal or banking details.”

Sophos also notes a rise in social networking spam during Q3 2010, with the widely reported ‘onMouseOver’ exploit creating spam tweets on Twitter, and a raft of Facebook scams that have been created by spammers to generate money from survey websites.

“What’s interesting about the Facebook scams is that they exploit human weaknesses to spread – tricking users into filling in a questionnaire if they want to see a shocking picture or video that may not even exist,” added Cluley. “Unfortunately, these scams continue to proliferate, with new ones springing up every day, and Facebook seemingly unable to kill them off permanently.”

One Facebook spammer has, however, recently been fined for using the social network to promote the sale of drugs.  Canadian Adam Guerbuez was fined US$100 for every one of the 4,366,386 spam posts he made, resulting in total fine of US$873.3 million (about €620 million). Guerbuez was able to spam from Facebook users’ accounts after phishing their login details.

Further information about the latest report can be found on Graham Cluley’s blog here.